The gang of six lost in Kyotoland
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Graeme Dobell
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Graeme Dobell's biography and other articles by this writer
The rotating vagaries of diplomatic timetables decreed that the United States unveil its climate change trump card on the banks of the Mekong River. The new answer to the danger of rising sea levels went public in the tiny capital of landlocked Laos. The voluntary solution to global warming first saw daylight in a communist state still run by the military.
The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate issued its manifesto into the cavernous space of the overgrown hangar that serves as the Laotian Convention Centre. The centre sits amid farmland on the edge of Vientiane. So, a hundred metres away, a lone farmer worked his field with a hoe as Alexander Downer chaired the press conference that launched the partnership.
The key point – almost the only fact in the announcement – was the membership. And that list made the splash. The US had found Australia the easiest of catches, the most enthusiastic of volunteers. It was the other members that were the substance of the headlines – India and China, along with Japan and South Korea. India and China, as the coming economic giants and new great polluters, had signed up to a partnership that had no emission targets and no enforcement mechanism.
The science will be endlessly argued. The new geopolitical fact is stark. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Asia-Pacific institutions could be created with an Asian membership based on Japan, South Korea and the ASEAN states of South-East Asia. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, India and China are indispensable.
The partnership announced itself while tepidly pledging not to undermine the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the treaty to limit global greenhouse-gas emissions. Kyoto's supporters clothed their contempt for the new partnership in condescension.
The birth notice of the partnership was a terse statement issued from the White House by US President George W. Bush a few hours before the press conference in Vientiane on July 28, 2005. With paternity clearly established, the US stepped back and allowed Australia's foreign minister to chair the announcement.
Downer said that, as the six partners "account for about half of the global GDP, population, energy use and greenhouse emissions, our collaboration can make a significant impact". He pointed to the vision statement that "outlines the core principles and our shared vision".
The key element in the one-page document was that it would be a "nonbinding compact" to develop and transfer cost-effective and cleaner technologies. The vision listed seventeen broad areas for possible collaboration. "Possible", mind, and then again there might be other areas they hadn't thought of. The list ran from clean coal to carbon capture, from nuclear power to rural and village energy systems, from home construction to hydropower, and not forgetting the wind and the sun among the renewables.
Downer was the ranking official, the only foreign minister on the podium. Japan's foreign minister was off elsewhere chasing votes for Tokyo's drooping effort to get a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. China's foreign minister had already left Vientiane for a more pressing engagement – to offer diplomatic comfort to Burma's military regime.
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, hadn't made it to Laos for the annual ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Conference involving more than twenty Asia-Pacific countries. The world's reigning diplomatic superstar doesn't do many remote-country gigs (as Sydney found when it hosted the first full meeting of the partnership in January 2006 without her).
The US representative sitting at the other end of the table from Downer in Vientiane was the US Deputy Secretary of State, Robert Zoellick. He went directly to the line that has become a mantra of the partnership – its nonbinding philosophy will complement, not replace, the rule-based targets of Kyoto. But not only will the partnership complement Kyoto, according to Zoellick, it will be better than Kyoto: "One can't just command other parties to do things. You can try, but it's not going to be effective, so you need to try to develop interests and incentives. The US is a member of the global climate convention – the agreement that was done in 1992. We've stated our differences with the Kyoto treaty. So we're committed to trying to address this effort, we just think that there's a better way to do it than the requirements of the Kyoto treaty."
ONE WAY OF KEEPING TRACK OF THE WINNERS AND LOSERS in diplomacy is to chart who sits at the table. And as the journalists filed out of the Vientiane conference room, it was clear one country had been snubbed. Diplomats from Canada roamed among the reporters offering an instant response to the creation of the partnership.
The equation was obvious. Canada didn't get new-partner status from Bush because it had refused to join the war in Iraq, turned down a role in the US missile defence program, and some in the Canadian government had been indiscreet in discussing their belief in the "Bush is a buffoon" school of analysis. And Canada was deeply tainted by its support for the Kyoto process. Had Canada followed the lead of the Bush White House and not ratified Kyoto, it could have put the treaty to the sword. Instead, Canada and Japan ratified and opened the way (when Russia eventually joined) for Kyoto to come into force in February 2005.
The modern media rule about applying immediate counter-spin came into play only minutes after Downer wound up the first partnership press conference. On the other side of the Vientiane convention centre, Canada's Foreign Minister, Pierre Pettigrew, strode from the Canadian delegation room to talk to a coven of journalists assembled by his diplomats. It was an exquisite example of praising with faint damns.
Pettigrew measured the members of the new Asia-Pacific partnership against the language of their founding document: "Well, first of all, this is a vision statement. So if the vision acknowledges that there is a problem, this is already progress. Second, I would say that in the vision statement they have acknowledged that this was a complement; it was not meant to replace Kyoto, but it was a complement to Kyoto. So when you want to complement something, you recognise that the real substance is somewhere else. A complement normally is something that adds on to something which is the real thing."
The correspondent from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation thought that an elegantly applied Canadian kick, but went straight to what had been the triumphant underlying note in the Downer-Zoellick press conference. I asked: "Does this, though, deal with the great gap that Kyoto has – this gets China and India to the table in a way that you had not been able to?"
As the microphone swung back to Pettigrew, he summoned up a political line that often runs on both sides of the US-Canada border. When questioning the lack of substance or detail in your opponent's argument, the question to ask is based on an old hamburger ad: "Where's the beef?" The Canadian foreign minister repeated his joy that more countries were preparing to confront the problem of climate change and then swung with gusto: "The words I see in the vision statement are, ‘We'll be working on non-binding things'. So I still have to wait for the meat. I mean, I'm pleased with the vision that is there. It is an acknowledgement of this problem we have with climate change. This is an improvement. This is progress, but I am still waiting for the meat."